Monday, March 27, 2017

I have some few degrees separation connections to people who have undocumented parents or similar (enough that I hear stories, not that there are bunch of people in my life directly), and people really are going underground. Scared to go to the usual gathering places, scared to drive in areas known (either truth or rumor) to have ICE checkpoints, etc.

If you've been in this country for decades and have children, this is your life. There is no life to return to. Getting kicked out means abandoning (not by choice) your children.

On February 15th, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice) officers conducted a raid in Las Cruces, arresting people at a trailer park on the outskirts of town. The raid came a few weeks after President Trump signed two executive orders, signalling his plans to fulfill a campaign promise of cracking down on undocumented immigrants. Rumors spread that there were further raids planned, though none took place. On February 16th, a Thursday, Las Cruces’s public schools saw a sixty-per-cent spike in absences compared to the previous week—twenty-one hundred of the district’s twenty-five thousand students missed school. Two thousand students stayed away again the next day. Attendance returned to normal the following week, which made the two-day rash of absences all the more pronounced. “It was alarming,” Greg Ewing, the district’s superintendent, told me. News of the raid caused such fear in the community that Ewing wrote a letter to parents on the 16th, in English and Spanish, reassuring them that “we do not anticipate any ice activity occurring on school campuses.”

His reassurances only went so far. Students might not have been at risk, but their parents seemed to fear that they themselves would be stopped coming or going from the schools. “Parents often don’t have legal papers,” he said. “They just have to survive day by day so their kids can get educated.” At the city’s high schools, absences went up by twenty-five per cent in the two days after the raids, but the numbers were even higher at the schools for younger students, where many still rely on their parents to drop them off and pick them up every day. In the two days after the raids, absences at elementary schools rose by almost a hundred and fifty per cent.